I just realized that I totally screwed myself over when my characters start interacting with my aliens in my story. I’ve made the aliens so different that writing dialogue is going to slow down my story progress to a crawl. Oi. (I just couldn’t resist the idea of aliens with a real sense of time, far beyond humans’ usual linear sense of it. Too bad that fucks up sentence tenses royally.) 4000 more words to go for this evening!

Oy. If I can keep this up for eight more days, I’ll win NaNoWriMo in time for classes to resume. Lessons learned today: Having two female protagonists in a lot of scenes together results in a problem: you can’t use pronouns as freely as you would otherwise. “She watched her…” just doesn’t work very well. Growl. It’s hard to know when to leave out a scene and how to properly make sure the important information gets known to the reader later. There’s a tendency to want to write out every little scene for word count purposes, but that just slows the plot down to a crawl. Microsoft Word’s Autosummarize feature…

“Laziness, like money, doesn’t really exist except to represent something else–in this case fear, severe self-judgment, or what Natalie Goldberg calls ‘the cycle of guilt, avoidance, and pressure.'” –Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft Not just in writing, in my opinion.